If you still engage regularly with football content and still haven’t jumped ship from X, chances are you’ll recognise your ‘For You’ algorithm as an absolute binfire.
Your feed is surely littered with the most obnoxious blue-tick gobsh*tes who have mastered the art of tribal pointscoring.
Engagement-bait nonsense can now be successfully monetised thanks to the genius in charge of the platform. Nice one, Elon.
“Genuinely, if Arsenal bottle this Premier League title it’s the biggest collapse of all time, no question about it,” the kind of re-microwaved-several-times-over lukewarm take routinely rewarded by thousands of likes. Yawn.
So it was particularly refreshing to see a genuinely thoughtful, generally bang-on quote-response somehow float to the top of a quagmire of guff, surprisingly enough from a fellow blue-ticker.
Well worth reposting in full, here’s the full post from football journalist Steve Kay:
If Arsenal lose this Premier League title, can we please retire the word ‘bottle’ for five minutes?
There’s a section of younger fans who can’t analyse a football match without throwing that word around.
Back in the day you never heard it every five minutes. Teams didn’t “bottle it” they ran out of steam, they lacked depth, they picked up injuries, they came up against a better side.
Not every dropped point is a psychological collapse.
To call something the biggest collapse of all time, you need context: How big was the points gap? Were there major injuries? Who were they competing against? Did they crumble in direct head-to-head games?
Losing a tight title race to an elite side isn’t bottling it.
That’s football.
Modern discourse has replaced tactical analysis with meme culture. Everything is banter now. But serious football conversations require more than one buzzword.
There’s a difference between collapsing under pressure and simply falling short over 38 games.
Football deserves better analysis than ‘they bottled it’.
Lots of salient points there. We in the football media could certainly do with looking in the mirror and recognising this – particularly the points about banter, meme culture and buzzwords.
Leave the on-the-whistle hot takes and painfully unfunny jibes to the footballer-as-avatar ‘Sakaology’ bottom feeders. Chances are you’re engaging with literal 14-year-olds. Needless to say, we ought to strive to be better than a Year 9 slanging match.
The only problem? That particular journalist would have done well to abide by his own words.
We don’t know who Steve Kay supports, but we can hazard a guess after sleuthing X users dug up his old posts laughing at Mauricio Pochettino’s Spurs for being “bottlers”.
It’s been over seven years since those particular posts. Growth is good. We’d like to think we’ve become a bit more considered over the same period.
But it’s funny how Tottenham were “bottlers” while we could all do with some mature critical thinking when it comes to Mikel Arteta’s Gunners, isn’t it?
Therein lies the heart of the matter. Social media’s race to the bottom has undoubtedly accelerated in recent years, but its malign influence on ‘the discourse’ isn’t anything new.
There were thousands of posts decrying Tottenham as yellow-bellied cowards who lacked the minerals to deliver a trophy.
Reductive? Most definitely. But it is what it is. The well has been poisoned for a long time. Now Arsenal find themselves swimming in the murky waters.
If Pochettino’s Spurs were “bottlers”, worthy of ridicule, that tag must apply tenfold to Arteta’s Arsenal until they make it over the line.
Want to bring nuance into it? That Tottenham side were always miles off the country’s big dogs in terms of their spend on wages and transfers.
Their world-class front four of Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen, Dele Alli and Son Heung-min cost just £38million – an era when the likes of Shkodran Mustafi and Henrikh Mkhitaryan cost about that alone.
In that context, it was a minor miracle that side finished 2nd with 86 points in 2016-17, the most goals scored and fewest conceded in the league, and later reached a Champions League final.
Spurs failed to sign a single player for two successive windows in the 2018-19 campaign, eventually ending their year-long transfer drought to sign Jack Clarke.
Under Pochettino, they never competed with the likes of Manchester City and Chelsea when it came to outlay and infamously missed their opportunity to improve a squad that was agonisingly close to glory.
In contrast, Arsenal have incrementally built Arteta’s squad every summer with a series of expensive, lavish additions. Imagine the uproar on Arsenal Twitter if they went a full 18 months without making a signing.
A team goes from averaging 2.4 points per game up to January to dropping to 1.4 points per game at a crucial juncture of the campaign, missing a golden opportunity to emulate last season’s Liverpool, pull away from the chasing pack and make the run-in a formality. What do you call that?
Going two goals up away to the cut-adrift bottom side, one chasing Derby County’s worst-ever record, and blow it?
No leading side in Premier League history has let a two-goal slip against a side in the relegation zone. Is that not a textbook bottling?
After decades in which St. Totteringham’s Day could be taken for granted as an annual celebration, Arsenal fans had to take the nasty medicine of finishing behind their north London rivals for six successive seasons.
As was their right, they could always take solace in Spurs ultimately having nothing tangible to show for that excellent team.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. If Arsenal don’t win something this season, the club will have become their favourite punchline.
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